Not seeing a huge difference from X2 so far. Haven't done much with the story part. Combat is somewhat harder. I attacked one of a group of three pirates. While tailing him, he accelerated out of range and the other two dropped back to tail me. Once I got over being dead, I was pleasantly surprised.

After that, I traded in for a hauler and went back to being a merchant. Energy shortages still appear to be the main thing holding back economies.

That expansion surprised me. I lurk on their forum occasionally and didn't see it coming.

I've only played a little X3, I got distracted by Skyrim and some Fallout DLC. Seemed much the same to me, but combat and AI was improved and stations/trading seemed smoother. Still had lots and lots of menus to drill into, but it didn't seem as cumbersome as X2. I haven't even cracked the Terran expansion.

Had a very brief play of X3: Reunion last night and it seemed pretty good. Only real problem I had (in about 1/2 an hour's play) was docking. Seems you either have to click on a station then select dock, then later click again and ask permission to dock. Or reverse the order. Or something, I dunno.

All I know is that once I must have screwed it up cos I ended up bouncing off the station a couple of times, which reduced my shields to nothing and then my hull down to 4%. When I discovered that repairing my hull cost 2k per % to repair, I threw my hands up in disgust and went to bed. Starting again tonight, I shall see how it goes.

Well, you certainly can autodock at times (with software I gather), as I managed it a time or two. Played around a bit tonight and was having a bit of fun until it crashed on me. Was just trying to get the initial patrol out of the way as I thought a bit of combat would be nice. But the silly patrol didn't follow me through the initial portal. Probably cos I didn't go round them up, lol.

Picked up terran conflict and the new albion prelude together on steam. playing prelude - its very pretty and a big interface improvement over X2 (can't remember x3 reunion particularly and never played TC before so don't know where the improvement came.)

Only weird thing is I cant find any solar power plants near the argon prime start. Very odd...

Bizarre-o. Played through the opening mission, just cos a beginner's guide said to. Then went back to Argon Prime and sold my M4 to concentrate on trading. Then the next time I went back into the sector where the mission kicks off I get the hail from the same bloke you meet up with as if I'd never done the mission in the first place. And yeah, I got confirmation from him after we got to cloud base alpha that I had completed it. So, not sure what's going on there.

Then after upgrading my ship a bit, managed one trading run, made about 120k profits on trading beefsteak cahoonas to a factory.

Took a little while yo figure things out. Like how to tell my second ship to go dock at a station so I could sell it. And how to actually sell it. And how to look at the trade prices at each station and so on and so on. Now just need to read up on how to use the trading software to find the best price for goods in a sector. Well, that's what it claims to be able to do, anyway.

But you'll probably have to buy the option to do it and use about 200 menus....

I now have 2 Mercs up and running around the main argon area, should have a third up shortly. The economy is totally buggered - nowhere has enough energy so theres no market for the higher value goods. Once i have supplied enough Ecells U shoudl be able to start shifting silicon and make some decent cash...